Before this trip I had never heard of Campeche. But in prep for the PanAm I have been cutting out articles for years from my favorite travel magazines as inspiration for this trip. I read one while we were in Palenque on this pastel UNESCO World Heritage site that talked about a walled city and pirates. You had me at pirates……
When we first walked through one of the walls near the bus station into the heart of the city I fell in love in seconds. It was hot, humid, romantic, and I felt like I was time traveling back to Havana, Cuba in the 1950s. People were wearing straw hats, white dresses, the ocean was close, and the smell of salt water was a beacon of cool from the oppressive humidity inside the colonial city.
Campeche had a different feel to other places in Mexico, it was more tropical. This was a city that had to build a wall and make forts to keep out pirates! Campeche is one of only three European colonial cities that built walls to keep out invaders from the water, the other two are Cartagena, Colombia and Quebec, Canada. It was just really cool to me.
Fort San Miguel
A little outside the city is one of the two forts built to defend the city. Fort San Miguel is now a Mayan art museum (it is not great as far as museums go….) but the fort is fun to walk around and gives you a sense of what it might have been like a few hundred years ago. And there is a fake but cool pirate ship anchored in the harbor below. I just wish the canons still worked…
Oh, and just a side note, outside of Campeche we stayed at our most expensive camp spot in all of Mexico. It was at a nautical club and during the week we had the entire place to ourselves. They had amazing facilities and I swam laps alone in the giant infinity pool overlooking the ocean. There are worse ways to spend $350 pesos or $28 dollars even though the WIFI never worked and the wind was howling.